


Truth and Reconciliation

by MotherInLore



Series: So, I Guess my Muse wants Marvel, now... [10]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor (Movies)
Genre: Canons are for Confetti, F/M, Fluff, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, I am not tagging the ship in this for Reasons, Light Petting, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Not Beta Read, SHIP DARCY LEWIS WITH ALL THE THINGS
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-26
Updated: 2018-09-26
Packaged: 2019-07-17 22:18:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,404
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16104953
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MotherInLore/pseuds/MotherInLore
Summary: Darcy maybe, just maybe has a Type.  Said type might, theoretically, be Tall, Dark, and Guilt-ridden.  Maybe.





	Truth and Reconciliation

He knows he shouldn’t be doing this. He doesn’t deserve it, and it’s dangerous for her. He does it anyway. He needs this: this one place, this one person, where it’s safe to fall apart. He needs the slow touch of her fingers running through his hair, down the back of his neck, across his shoulders. Needs the sweet smell he can pick up when he buries his head in the curve of her neck (never lower down; he doesn’t deserve that) and cries.

Even here, he is not entirely himself. He exaggerates the Brooklyn accent a little, is careful to call Darcy “dollface” or “sweetheart,” carry himself, at least a little, like the Bucky Barnes that charmed nuns and shopgirls and WACs once upon a time. It makes her smile. He’d do a lot more than that to have her smile at him like that. He doesn’t know if the old Bucky Barnes would have been so quick to help her with the cooking or fixing up her apartment. When she tells him to, only then. Sometimes she comes back from her lobbying job sick to the brim of being polite and deferential and subtle, or even charmingly brash, and when that happens she calls him “My minion,” or, sometimes, “Dobby,” and delights in giving him orders. The orders are never painful. Always simple things like, “peel those potatoes for me,” or, “You! Tall guy! Can you change that lightbulb? The overhead is seriously about to die and plunge us all into the darkness of the Sarlac Pit.” And she always thanks him afterward. And feeds him. And lets him drape himself half over her as they both sit on the couch, and listens, and tells him, always, exactly what he needs to hear, over and over again, as many times as he needs to hear it.

“Dude,” she says, and the word was a command earlier, but now it is a dove’s coo, “don’t do that to yourself, OK? It doesn’t matter what the guys who tortured you wanted you to be, or what your family wanted you to be, or even what th- Steve wanted you to be. You are free. You’re in charge of you, now, and you get to decide to be a good person if you want, right? And if you wanna, like, run away and raise goats, that’s fine too.” And the fingers comb through his hair, and there’s a pillow on her lap, and he half wishes there wasn’t, wishes Bucky Barnes, Ladies’ Man was really who he was now and he could tease her legs open… but he needs mercy more than he needs sex, and he will not risk it.

“I’ve killed so many people, Dollface,” he whispers, the tears starting to leak, struggling to find the words that will mean something to her, that will let him hold onto the Bucky she wants him to be and the man he his, “so many people, and some of them I don’t even know which side I was fighting for… like, why is it... who gets to say it was OK to kill these guys and not those ones, because you were fighting for the good guys that time and not that other time? How do I even know anymore? How do I pay that back when even the good guys leave blood on my hands?”

He doesn’t deserve her, because her fingers card through his hair and the words that come out of her mouth he would never have thought of in a thousand years. “You know, don’t tell Steve this, but I don’t really believe in justice. Fairness, sure, but so much of what we call justice is pretending we can undo the past. Like, one person suffering now somehow cancels out someone else suffering earlier. It just… you can’t, you know? And the good people turn themselves inside out trying, and the bad ones just game the system, and that kind of thing… you can’t just add it up like coins. So don’t. Do what you can do, where you can. Anyone tell you about South Africa, yet?”

He blinks his eyes open, a little startled. “No, I don’t believe so.”

“Look up the Truth and Reconciliation Committee sometime. It’s a whole country with too much red in too many ledgers, and they decided they had to find a way to let it go.”

He looks it up, and it takes weeks to begin to wrap his head around it. None of the armies he was ever in would have come up with something like this. He avoids Darcy for a while, goes on a mission or two with Steve (whose recklessness is horribly familiar; what is it about those people who trust you to pull their nuts out of the fire that makes you want to do it?) But it’s draining. He gets tired of brotherly slaps on the back and stoicism and awkward attempts to talk, and he needs to disappear again. Ironic that he would choose an apartment in Washington, DC to disappear into, but he never had a problem with irony.

“Oh, hey!” Darcy smiles wide at him when she sees him in the kitchen, “It’s Old Man Winter! My day no longer sucks!” She is shedding clothes with an alacrity that makes his groin twitch, though it’s not for him. She peels off a close-fitting blazer and reaches under her shirt to unhook her bra, kicking her shoes ahead of her into her bedroom. She re-emerges later, her hair tousled from having pulled a sweater over it, her eyes sheltered by her glasses again but no longer layered in paint and powder, looking soft, so soft, and she comes right up to him, fearlessly, to say, “what’s up?”

He shouldn’t do this. He needs her as a friend too badly, but she is there, and her mercy is unending, and he bends his head just a little and kisses her on the lips.  
She backs away from him immediately, scowling. 

“I’m sorry,” he babbles, “I’m sorry, doll, I know I shouldn’t have… I promise it won’t… I’m sorry.” None of his words make any impact on the ferocity of her glower. “Please,” he says.

Darcy crosses her arms over her chest. “Tell you what, Loki. You start coming over in your own shape instead of Barnes’, and I’ll think about maybe kissing you back.”

There is a long, stunned silence. He straightens up a little, to his full height, letting the illusion fall away. Darcy tilts her head.

“How long have you known?” Loki asks, _“How?”_

Darcy shrugs and scoots past him into the kitchen, her hips brushing against his thighs just a little. “A few different things,” she says into the open refrigerator. “Near as I can tell, Barnes never quite had that same resentment for Steve that you do for Thor, though God knows Steve’s earned it if he did. And that one story about the policeman’s horse? That was really you and Thor and the king of Alfheim, wasn’t it? Thor loves that story and he’s told it like a zillion times. And sometimes your accent slips a little.”

Loki looks at the items Darcy is pulling out and pulls out the skillet and the cutting board she’ll want in a moment or two. “Ah, well,” he says, trying to sound light and careless, “Researching the oeuvre of Master Cagney can only take one so far, I suppose.”

Darcy straightens and looks at him, then points an imperious finger at the cutting board. “Start with the fennel, Dobby, and then the onions after that.”

“Yes’m.”

Loki starts with the fennel, while Darcy heats oil in the skillet and fishes minced garlic out of a small plastic tube. “I meant what I said before,” she says without looking at him. “I mean, all of it. Whatever happened to you before, whatever you’ve done, if you’re trying to move on, that’s enough for me. Just, I just need a little honesty, yeah?”

He doesn’t deserve her, and it’s dangerous for him to keep coming back. But he lets himself reach around her with the cutting board to scrape the chopped fennel into the pan. Lets his chest touch her back, and she leans into him, just a hairsbreadth. “Only a _little_ honesty?” He breathes into the top of her head. “I suppose I can do that.”

**Author's Note:**

> This was literally a dream I had - Loki pretending to be Bucky so someone would pet his head and call him poor sweet baby.


End file.
